A study published in The Lancet, a leading medical journal, found that as of April 2020, 6.9 percent of people in Wuhan had antibodies to the CCP virus, and 82 percent of them had asymptomatic infections. The Chinese experts who conducted the study said the findings suggest that a large portion of China’s population remains uninfected with the virus, and therefore mass vaccination is needed to achieve herd immunity to prevent a resurgence of the outbreak. The figure also shows that the actual number of people infected with the CCP virus in Wuhan far exceeds the officially announced figure.
File photo: Masked residents walk past a mural called “Memory” on the eve of the 76-day anniversary of the closure of the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the CCP virus was first discovered. (Jan. 22, 2021)
The new study is the first long-term seroepidemiological study of residents of Wuhan, China. Researchers tested antibodies in 9,542 people from 3,556 households in 13 districts of Wuhan after the city’s embargo was lifted in April 2020 and then again between June and October-December 2020.
According to this paper, published in The Lancet medical journal, 532 of these participants tested positive for antibodies to the CCP virus, a result that, when adjusted, corresponds to an estimated seropositivity rate of 6.9% in the Wuhan population. In addition, 82% of the participants who tested positive did not have any symptoms of the CCP virus.
Of those with antibodies, 40% produced neutralizing antibodies to prevent future infection in April, and these antibodies remained stable for at least nine months, regardless of whether the individual had symptoms.
The study was conducted by medical researchers in China, and the paper’s lead author was Wang Chen, an expert in respiratory and critical care Medicine and president of the Peking Union Medical College of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.
An English-language press release in The Lancet quotes Wang Chen as saying, “Assessing the proportion of CCPV-infected and immunocompetent populations is critical for identifying effective prevention and control strategies to reduce the likelihood of a future pandemic resurgence. Given that lightly infected individuals may not seek medical care and asymptomatic infected individuals are often not screened, there may be large discrepancies between reported cases of CCHV and actual infections, as has been demonstrated by experience and data from other countries.”
The authors of the article said their findings suggest that a large proportion of the population remains uninfected and that mass vaccination is needed to achieve herd immunity to prevent further recurrence of the pandemic.
The seroepidemiological study of Wuhan follows those conducted worldwide, including Geneva, Switzerland, Spain, the United States, Iceland and the Netherlands. These studies attempted to illustrate the true prevalence of infection in the population.
If one were to count the number of infections based on a 6.9% seropositivity rate in the Wuhan population, this would mean that the number of people infected with the CCP virus in the 19 million people in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, as assessed by the WHO, exceeded 1.3 million last April, while the CCP government at the Time reported more than 50,000 confirmed cases of the CCP virus in Wuhan and less than 70,000 in Hubei province.
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